How to make a dry washer - build your own gold catching dry washer - capture desert gold

hey i'm chris ralph the professional prospector and today i'm going to be talking a little bit about dry washers you know i was out dry washing recently i spent some time i want to show you a little bit of the gold i found take a look now that's uh uh not totally pure material but it's about two-thirds by weight gold so the four grams there that's uh you know almost a tenth of an ounce of gold so i'm real happy with that and it's a nice find a gold dry washer is a really useful tool there are a lot of folks who find some really nice gold with their dry washers and it's a great tool to get all the gold to go with your metal detector you know you can use a metal detector and find a patch of nuggets that very commonly that's what occurs as nuggets occur in groups but there's some of the gold that may be just too small to see with your metal detector and a dry washer is a great tool to pick that up let me show you what i did on one patch you can see that i took this picture and on the one side the coarser material that's the nuggets that i found with my metal detector and on the left hand side the smaller material is the stuff i found with a dry washer basically it was a great patch and by using a dry washer i more than doubled what i found in that area so you know if you go out and find a patch and you get an ounce or half an ounce you know you could maybe double the amount of gold that you get out of that patch and patches are hard to find so you know taking a dry washer in and doubling your fines that ain't a bad thing now my dry washer here is a commercial unit and i uh i bought it but the truth is until recent decades pretty much all dry washers were homemade units that's only been in in the last 40 or 50 years that you could even buy a thing like a dry washer all the ones before that and they've been used for 150 200 years and more were always homemade by the person who used them and in fact they're still homemade a lot in some developing nations there are places where guys improvise dry washers out of whatever junk and other stuff that they can find and here i'll show you a picture here are some folks in mongolia working a dry desert placer with some machines you can look here and see some of these dry washers are commercial other ones you can see here are very much homemade and these guys are able to make a a good living at least living much better than what they would be able to get in other forms of employment in their country and by doing so they do it with a dry washer so it's an important tool for them and it's becoming more and more important in africa as well you know my experience in africa was that it was an excellent place and when i visited six or seven years ago there really were uh a very few dry washers in use but i told people hey this is something you ought to look into and sure enough in in today's date there are a lot of people using dry washers and a lot of companies selling them in africa so it's a a material or it's it's a tool that's really useful to find a lot of gold and like i say they've been used for hundreds of years and were mostly popular in drier places like mexico or the the desert southwest in the u.s other dry locations you know i mentioned africa just a second ago there are certainly parts of africa that are very dry and have gold and so uh you know it's something that's been in use for a long time because it's a great tool and you can get a lot of gold in places where you know there just isn't the water to be running a dry or when running a wet sluice box or that sort of thing here take a look at some of the old time dry washers homemade that were used in years past and they'll give you an idea of you know what's possible so here's an old dry washer this is a picture taken in the california desert and you know it's a hand shoveled uh hand operated one here's a dry washer that's operated by a gasoline engine you can see they've connected the gas engine and the dry washer with a solid shaft because you know the guys that are shoveling into the dry washer don't want to be right next to the exhaust of the engine in fact even this short distance is probably awful close uh here's a drawing of some dry blowers and this these are operators in australia because in australia a dry washer is called a dry blower but the design is very similar and really the differences between the different ones are very small dry washers are just a great tool for working small isolated rich patches almost anywhere where it's dry now this means you know some places there are actually mine dumps the old hard rock mines where you could put the material in here and get good gold out because you know when the miners blasted it breaks up a lot of the vein to be you know just fine sand and dust and the finer sand with some gold in it you can put in here from a mine dump and it would work but you know honestly any place where there's an isolated rich patch a residual plaster that you found with a metal detector like you know i showed you a bit ago where you know there's gold there and it's away from any water well a dry washer is just the tool for getting the other gold out of that i'm trying to convince you how useful a dry washer is and that you might just want one for yourself now dry washers come in all sorts of different kinds of designs and i want to show you some of those so you can get some ideas for yourself you know as to which type you might want to build so let's take a look at some of the different designs that are commonly used on dry washers or have been used in dry washers in the past and i'm going to show you both old-timey units and some more modern ones this is an old-timey hand crank design it has a really steep screen on the feed hopper side a lot more steep than i'd like to see it and then it's set up to actually dump the oversize and the undersized tailings off the drive washer recovery sluice in the same place which is also not desirable but i'm sure this thing worked well and it was used in the deserts of nevada this is a new commercial design with the feed hopper and screen on the top feeding down into the recovery sluice area below and then you can see the fan over on the side there connected by a fan duct hose air duct hose to underneath the uh the recovery sluice area where the air can blow up through there and it has a setup in there that it would vibrate as it uh as the air comes through this is the unit i use it's a bellows type unit with an electric motor that runs off a 12-volt battery you can't really see the motor very well or the battery it's off to the side but it works great and you can just turn it on run it for when you need it and then turn it off i really like it a lot and honestly you could build one of these relatively easily these are a couple of medium-sized units that are powered by what's essentially a leaf blower fan attached to a bucket this is a really slick kind of arrangement where the leaf blower and bucket unit can be used to suck dry material off of bedrock in a little drainage and then things can be rearranged and you take the material and feed it into the dry washer and the same fan blowing out can run the dry washer so it's kind of slick gives you two tools in one which is why a number of manufacturers make things like this and but it could be made easily at home some of the different kinds of designs include designs that are a battery powered or hand operated either with a crank or with a pull rope or with a gas powered engine you know you've got to have an air source with the dry washer it has to have some source of air because it's air that does the work in a dry washer and then you know you also have different kinds of designs whether they be big or small you know the gasoline engine ones have a tendency to be your more productive types your your types that really produce a lot more or can handle the throughput of a lot more gravel the smaller ones tend to be more portable you can carry them in easily to places where it might be hard to get to mine the one that i have now is kind of a medium i can carry it in myself and basically it's two trips one to carry the dry washer and then the next one to carry the battery and the tools and other accessories that go with working the dry washer buckets and that sort of thing shovel um so two trips to get mine in but uh years ago i used to have a smaller one and i literally could put it under one arm and tools in the bucket and the other hand and i go into one trip on the other hand the big heavy duty ones that have gasoline powered engines those things can take you know four or five trips you know to get the the engine the dry washer unit the shovels and tools um the gasoline you know it can really be a lot of effort to get it in so a lot of people with those they end up working sites that you can drive real close to and if you want to limit yourself to that well then you know that's an option it also is the big ones are more expensive i mean what you pay for a new dry washer if you buy a manufactured ones and then even if you build one it'll take you unless you have just happen to have stuff lying around the house uh it'll take you more effort and more time and more money to build your own of the type that is able to process more now there are advantages to customizing and coming up with your own design and picking out what you want you may choose to you know use tools that you have available you know if you have access to a sheet metal brake maybe you'll want to make it out of aluminum if you have access to woodworking tools maybe you want to work make it mostly out of plywood and such things you know it's a matter of choice and that's partly why i'm not going to give you guys any specific plans you know buy a board this big buy a piece of cloth this big you know i i i want you to make it out of your own designs as i showed you a little earlier there's guys in third world countries that are just building in out of whatever scrap they have on hand wood and whatever to turn it into their own dry washer and they're finding good gold with these machines so you know i want you to be able to make it out of what you have on hand which will save you money if you have any of that kind of stuff on hand or have access to it and if of course you customize it to your own needs then it's going to be what you want and what you need whether you want high capacity or high portability or whatever something to trade off in between you know you're going to have the chance to choose for yourself in your own design what you want so what i'm going to have you do what i'm going to do right now is i'm going to go over how a dry washer works so that you can put together your own pieces of design and understand your own unit and how it works so let's talk about how dry washers work okay basically on the simplest level a dry washer is essentially an air sluice you're thinking of a sluice box that you put in water or you have water come in from a pump and basically the flow of the water does the work of separating the heavy materials from the light materials the light materials work their way on out of the sluice and the heavy materials get stuck in the riffles and and in the matting of a sluice box well for all intents and purposes a dry washer is an air powered sluice only you don't have a wind blowing in the top you basically have air blowing up from underneath that's why some people actually call it an air jig because jigs have puffs of water that move up from below but the the whole point is you know a uh an air jig or an air sluice is that the air will keep the material and suspended the the riffle tray or recovery tray of a sluice box always has a pretty good tilt to it and the air pushes up the lighter material and it the lighter material works its way on down out and into the tailings pile whereas the heavier material gets stuck and that's the whole point of making this loose box work is that you want to get the lighter material on through and keep the heavier material which includes gold but also includes black sand and other heavy things like that i went to a place recently where there was tungsten uh minerals that are heavy and they also turned up in the concentrates now one of the things that you need to know about dry washing is that you want the material to be well broken up here i'll show you an example of a big dirt clod and a big dirt clod like this you know even if you broke it up into some smaller pieces so that it would go through your screen you know if there's any gold in the dirt clods uh you know the dirt cloths because they're essentially light okay if there's any gold though that's trapped in the clod then the gold is gonna move on out of the sluice out of the recovery tray and into the tailings pile with the rest of the tailings so you don't really want that right well you you might think well you know how much gold is really caught in the dirt cloths here let me show you an example of what you can find we found this now it was originally found with a metal detector but look at this dirt clod it's just full of nuggets and you know you wouldn't want some pieces of this to make its way out and into your tailings pile uh you know when this thing was broken up literally it had about a quarter of an ounce of gold in it so dirt clods could be a real problem and you need to be aware of that when you're processing soil through a dry washer if it's clotty and chunky and not sandy and loose if it's chunky like that then you know it could be a problem dry washing that kind of material so if you're going to have an air powered sluice you have to have some source of air right when you use a regular swiss box you have to have some source of water so you're going to have to have some source of air now the standard design for most uh as well is either for most dry washers it's either a continuous blower that might be powered by a gasoline engine or you have a bellows type that is a puff puff puff and the the puffs of air are what don't do the work instead of a continuous blowing that you have with the uh the engine powered ones now the engine powered ones i freely admit they have a tendency to be able to process a lot more gravel but they're a lot less portable one of the things that you can find though that's kind of a compromise you know when you're out digging in material and collecting of course the gold wants to as in any water washed gravel material wants to work its way down to bedrock a lot of guys will use what they call a crack back or it's a vacuum with a bucket that they use to suck material out of crevices or off the bedrock because if you have jagged bedrock it'd be hard to get all the little material out from between the cracks and out between the jagged bedrock and a lot of times that's where the best gold is so you the idea of a vacuum to vacuum up the bedrock is a good one and there's uh ways that you can take basically they use like a leaf blower type of thing to run these and then you can turn around and take the same engine that runs the the vacuum the crevice and bedrock vacuum and then you can use that same engine to run your dry washer so there's commercial units like that i can show you but a lot of the old time ones the old timey ones that were made in in years gone by those ones tended to be the bellows type because they're easier to make and if you if you want to ask the question hey what's easier bellows is easier but you know like i said with the the bedrock vacuum there's advantages to that now if you do go with the blower type one of the things that you have to remember is that always these blowers will have right at the uh where the the air duct comes into the underneath the recovery tray they have a little fan blade that's not powered it's just powered by the air blowing in and it spins and they'll put a counterweight on one of the blades so that it spins not perfectly it spins uh eccentrically and and that what what that does is it causes the thing to vibrate with the bellows you have the action the puff puff puff that's a shaking action that helps settle the gold down and get the lighter stuff on out with uh with a continuous fan blade or continuous fan type of thing you don't have that same sort of a shaking action that you have in the puff of the bellows so that's why they have this fan blade that rotates and causes vibration in the the recovery box and i'll show you a picture of that right now now i said that the bellows are easier to use and they you know the bellows are just what standard were used in the old days mostly because they're so much easier and and uh an engine is hard i've seen some versions where they used an electric motor and then had a generator nearby and just had an extension cord to connect them you know for your continuous blower types my dry washer that i use the most is a bellows type but it has a uh basically it's a 12 volt windshield wiper motor that makes the bellows operate and you know the bellows puff puff puff as the the little 12-volt windshield wiper motor spins around and there's a lot of commercial units that use that and you can design that in yourself i went with that just because i didn't want to do the hand crank or or uh pulling on a rope to make the bellows operate i decided that i wanted to upgrade to a motor operated one that i could feed and just run and because it's electric um it's easy to turn off and on have a switch whereas you know with the gasoline-powered engine you know you start the engine up and run it and then of course you have to go over there and fiddle with it to cut the engine off it's not as simple a thing as just off on on a switch there's advantages and disadvantages of all of those and so the engine ones tend to process more power the 12-volt battery is kind of a compromise the hand operated ones are the lightest and simplest to build and operate so now we want to consider some of the different design materials that you might use for making a dry washer historically the old timer ones were all made out of wood and you can make a dry washer out of wood the only thing i recommend you do is that you assemble it with screws rather than nails simply because you're moving the thing around and gets shaken you know if it's a bellows type and you get the shake during the puff puff puff cycle all the moving around and everything else just means that if you have a nail there's a higher probability the nail will work itself out whereas if you're screwed into the thing it's going to be good and solid and hold together reliably that's just something you need to remember now if you have access to a brake a sheet metal brake you know aluminum and assembled with pop rivets is a good choice and to tell you the truth honestly um you can use a combination of sheet metal and like your sheet aluminum and wood together to make your dry washer there's nothing that says you can't do that and actually that's probably a good way to do it let me show you a number of different designs from old time and modern dry washers that you can take a look at and we'll talk about each of these about their advantages and disadvantages and they can help you give you they can help to give you ideas of how you might want to make a dry washer for yourself this is a homemade dryer washer project that i had kind of set out for myself and started making drawings so that i could figure out how i wanted to do it i basically was going to have an a-frame uh legs to hold the thing up but you can see the feed box that's my hopper and on the upper side of the hopper would have been a screen that i could have you know shoveled material into and then once you get it going material comes through the feed box and then goes down into the sluice section and i was going to use a motor to provide air for this and then have aluminum angle to connect the legs to make it sturdy but this is an idea that i had had and something that i'd drawn up this is another design for a dry washer of the bellows type and you can see better the feed hopper section and how that works and then the riffles down below it would have been this one would have been bellows operated and could have been attached to a motor of some sort or perhaps powered by a pulley if you set that in there this sketch shows better the system or the riffles and how the air goes in how the bellows work and how a hand crank would work with the bellows and you can just see how that would work you could also substitute something like my windshield wiper motor a 12-volt motor for the hand wheel crank but the idea is the same the bellows need a check valve you can see they have their mark they call it a clack valve but it is very basically a check valve so that when the the bellows pressurize material in the bellows gets pushed into the air chamber and when the bellows are going down material from the outside can go into the bellows from the lower clack valve now the essence of a dry washer is that it's basically two boxes okay one box is a material that's basically a hopper and it has a screen on top and you might use something like this uh woven wire screen material this is a little coarse the holes are a little bit big remember a dry washer the screen has to be such that air can move the material through you have to have a screen you know if you put in golf ball sized rocks into your dry washer the air won't be able to move it through okay even if you have a good hard gasoline engine blower that's not going to be able to move material through so this woven wire is a little bit coarse but it's available in different sizes so you can buy this kind of material in a variety of different size ranges and get one a little smaller than this but this is the concept it's good and solid boom boom boom uh you don't want flimsy uh woven wire material that's you know not going to stand up to the abuse of having gravels thrown against it now here is a bit of woven wire material the openings on this are around a half an inch and this would be great this is a good size for the screen for a hopper this kind of woven material but you can get expanded in in similar size ranges so this is a good material that the fact this is about the right size range for the hopper on a homemade dry washer and it would allow you to shove the material on and get the material to go through and into the hopper box now when you're selecting the size for a screen remember that uh whatever size you get the uh if you get it too large the large pebbles will get stuck in your dry washer and then it won't work right if you get it too small remember that any nugget that you find that's too big to fall through the hole of the dry washer is going to end up in your oversized handling pile because that's what you end up with with a screen you have material that's too big you have an oversized pile and material that's small enough it goes through and runs through the dry washer and that's your material that the tailings that have actually gone through the dry washer so the first part of the system is a screen with a hopper box and the hopper then stores gravels up to be processed through the dry washer and my thought on this i prefer the angle of my screen to be somewhat lower a little bit so that i can hand break up any dirt clods remember we mentioned the problem of dirt clods break up any dirt clods and and screen it now some people will want to have it real steep then you can throw material on it and the material will just work its way through you won't need to by hand control it at all um the problem with that is you know dirt claws will roll right off and and and sometimes even you know if it's too steep the material will just slide right off and and the smaller material even won't go through the screen it won't have a chance to to actually fall through the screen holes so choice of of the right size and around half an inches is the kind of size you want as your maximum size um you may find an expanded metal screen that is a half inch tall and three quarters or something like that wide that's probably fine you just don't want too large on your screen otherwise you won't be able to use the air to move the material through it'll just be too heavy and get stuck in there so your hopper that's the first thing and then there's a little usually a feed gate at the bottom of the hopper that you can open or close a little gate it's just a a piece of metal that slides uh over the hole or slides away from the hole to control what feed rate goes through into the lower section which is your ripple tray and your air box so normally there's a box with the riffle tray in it and the air comes in and it gets distributed through this box and it comes up through the riffle tray or or recovery tray that is lined on the bottom with cloth which is the big difference between a sluice water sluice which has a solid bottom and a dry washer sluicer recovery box which has cloth on the bottom so the air can come up through it i'm going to take a little closer look at that with you right now probably the most important part of your dry washer is the recovery it kind of looks like a sluice box where material comes in here and then goes over these riffles and and on out and this captures the the heavier materials one of the things that's different is in a dry washer the heavy materials are caught in front of the riffle not behind and the big huge difference is the bottom see this is not a solid bottom in a sluice box a regular sluice box this bottom would be a solid material iron or wood or aluminum but in this the bottom is a cloth and a porous cloth like a muslin type of material it's it's a cloth based because air has to come up from underneath it has to blow through it's a demonstration right uh air has to blow through here in order for the air to do the work you see basically what happens is the force of air coming through here and this is of course on a tilt as the air comes through here the dust and lighter materials get blown on down and with each puff it moves downward and that way you get the lighter material moving off and the heavier material stays in front of the riffles and doesn't get blown away so when you make one of these now this can be made out of wood you basically are building a frame you want at least aluminum or metal up here you want a part where because this is the material that comes down from your feed box and will hit the ripple system here and then begin to work its way down as it moves down through the dry washer so you want something hard here to handle the wear and then as it gets down here this material has to be like i say a muslin cloth however there's different ways of doing it this one is actually glued on right it's a metal type of a recovery box and the the cloth underneath is glued on it also has a little bit of foam along the edges to help seal and keep the air from blowing away it is a dusty operation dry washing um this little tail part is what holds the thing in place there's a little wingnut screw that goes through here and and holds it in place but the air can come up through here and the air does the work so when you build this whether you build it out of metal or out of wood and it was wood of course your riffles will be wood you still want to have this cloth on the bottom with wood you could actually use tacks and tack it on but you can still use glue to help make sure that it stays on tightly this is an important piece and it's it's really important that you get this right because this is the part that does the work that actually separates the heavy materials like gold or black sand from the light materials the the quartz and dust and and silt and other material that you want to move on out of the box so take a look at this take a look at some of the ones that are on the market you know if you can actually go look at a a manufactured sluice box it may be very helpful to you to just see it in person and get a better idea but that's how mine is made it's metal the cloth is glued on there's little strips of foam to help seal the ripple tray against the air box that's underneath it and this is true whether you have a whether you have a blower type of a system or whether you use a bellows type of a system i hope you've enjoyed my presentation on how you can make your own dry washer this particular unit when i bought it was i think 8 900 bucks you could certainly build something for a whole lot cheaper than that that would work well and be efficient and capture gold for you out in the field and be a great tool for prospecting and finding gold i recommend you sit down and you take a look at all the pictures that are in this presentation the older dry washers that some of the dry washer designs and take a look at all that stuff and and write down for yourself what you want in the way of an ideal sluice whether you want to emphasize portability that's a good thing or whether you want to emphasize production you know there's a lot of different possibilities and you can you know go through and figure out for yourself what will work and what you can build with the tools you have available now once you've built that really nice dry washer and it's it's all ready to go well you've got to take it out and find some gold with it and in order to do that you'll need the skillza prospector you know prospecting is like any other kind of trade skill whether it be being a plumber or an electrician or something like that what you whether what your success is it depends on what you know and the same is true for prospecting and so to help people find more gold and to be more successful i've written a book about prospecting it's kind of an encyclopedia and i'm going to tell you a little bit more about my book right now so let me tell you a little bit more about my book um it's called this full of gold and i wrote it because i want you to be able to go out and find for yourself this full of gold and uh you can see that it's a an encyclopedia with all kinds of information pictures and that sort of thing it's not in color but the color would have cost me a lot more to have printed and so the book would have cost a lot more it's for sale on amazon and you can pick it up i'll put a link in the description below i also serve as the editor for a prospecting magazine it's icmj's prospecting and mining journal and honestly you should check that out we've got stories and information legal stuff everything you know to increase your skills as a prospector i write articles in this every month and a lot of other very experienced prospectors contribute to the magazine as well so check the magazine out also i have a website and the website is at nevadaoutbackgems.com i'll put a link for it in the description below but there's gogs of information there that you will find useful in your prospecting efforts finally i want to say that i really appreciate your comments and thoughts and even a positive criticism don't come on there and just toss out insults because i'll just delete your comments but if you've got helpful things to say and questions to ask do write and and put those in the comments because i answer my comments to people and uh you'll hear from me in you know in responding to you uh so if you've enjoyed this video and you like what you see and you're interested in uh finding out more well then sign up subscribe and hit the uh the notification bell so they'll let you know when i post new videos and you know like it and share it if again you you see stuff that you really are excited about and i'll be coming out with lots more new videos and so we'll see you again real soon

Channel: Chris Ralph, Professional Prospector

Views: 32,303

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Id: dcp-Y7DybUU

Length: 37min 41sec (2261 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 07 2020